Personal Selling & Negotiation Skills

Often times in my seminars, I like to ask the crowd how many of them are in the business of sales. Usually, I get 10%-20% of the audience raising their hands. It is at this point of time, that I tell them, ” many of you may not realize this…but ALL OF YOU are in the business of sales”. This is because if we want to achieve anything in our life, we must be a master at SELLING’. At this point, sound people would give me a rather dumbfounded look.

If You Want to Succeed in Anything, You Have to Learn How to Sell
I go on to explain. Think about it. Isn’t it true that to achieve anything in life, you have to be good at selling? You have to be good at selling yourself, your ideas and the products/services of your company. For example, if you want to land a job in a top company, having a great resume and top grades is not enough. Ultimately, it is all about the interview! What’s an interview? An interview is a sales pitch. You have usually less than 20 minutes to sell yourself and your ideas to your employer. You have to convince the interviewer why YOU are the best choice compared to the many others who will be competing for the position. If you don’t have the ability to do so, the best written resume and all the years of experience will not get you the opportunity you have been looking for.

The same thing goes if you want to climb up the corporate ladder. In the corporate world, it is not always the most loyal, most hardworking and the most deserving who get the promotions and the increments. Again, those who get promoted the fastest and get paid the highest are the ones who know how to sell their ideas and sell themselves to their bosses. They are able to convince their bosses that they deserve to be paid more and are the best people for the top job. I have seen so many hardworking and loyal people get passed up for promotions simply because they lacked the skill to stand up and sell themselves.

Am I saying that as long as you can sell and talk big, you can get away with anything? OF COURSE NOT! You have to be good at your work and deliver what you say you can deliver, If not, great selling will only get you temporary success and eventual, permanent failure. What I am saying is that you have to be able to do great work and offer great value to your customers. However, if you do not have the skills to sell what is good, then you will never get the results you want.

If you want to succeed in business, you have to be great in sales as well. In fact, the boss of a company has got to be great at selling his vision to his employees, selling his company to investors and selling his products to customers. Whenever I ask people whether McDonald’s or Burger King has the best tasting burgers, I usually get the majority agreeing that Burger King has better tasting burgers.

So, why is it that McDonald’s in 100 times more successful than Burger King? The reason is because the founder and first CEO of McDonald’s (Ray Kroc) was a great salesman and the founder of Burger King was not. Before Ray Kroc created the McDonald’s franchise, he was a top salesperson, selling milkshake makers to restaurants all over the US. It is this sales culture that all McDonald’s employees are trained in that has made McDonald’s the most successful franchise in the world.

Have you ever realized that whenever you order to cheeseburger from McDonald’s, they don’t reply by saying, ‘okay. That will be $x.’ Instead, they follow up with the question, ‘would you like to have a meal with that?’ Then comes the question, ‘Upsize? How about dessert? Toy for just $1?’ They artfully sell and sell until they maximize their profits and the customers gets the maximum value. Its a win win.

The same thing goes in politics. You don’t have to be the smartest, most experienced nor most intelligent person to become elected President of the United States. You have to be the country’s greatest salesperson! Barack Obama is not the most intelligent guy in the US with the highest credentials. They are millions of Americans who have superior IQs with multiple PhDs. He is certainly not the most experienced. His vice-president, Joe Biden and his contenders, John McCain and Hillary Clinton have decades more experience than him. So, why is Obama the President? Again, it’s because he is the much better salesman! He was able to sell his dream to the American people and sell himself as the best person for the job.

If you want to attract the man/woman of our dreams, don’t you have to be great at selling as well? When you went out on dates, those were all sales pitches weren’t they? If you succeeded in selling yourself as their life partner, then you closed the sale! Some people unfortunately never seem to be able to close the sale. Then there are those that close the sale and are asked for a refund later (this is my feeble attempt at humour).

Why Most People Are Lousy At Selling
I have to admit that in the past, I felt very uncomfortable with selling. I did not have a good impression of ‘salespeople’ and felt uneasy asking people to buy things and to hand over their money. I also felt ‘pai seh’ (embarrassed) telling people my strengths. I find this very common among fellow Asians. Our Asian upbringing has programmed us to feel uncomfortable with standing out and selling ourselves. When we are young, we are told not to be ‘hao lian’ (show off) and to geh khiang (act smart).

At the same time, the education system we goes through teaches us almost everything expect the skill of selling. In fact, I have found that the more academically educated that people get, the more self conscious they get, the more they fear rejection (and feel they have something to lose) and the less they are able to sell.